Mendix’s top 10 blog posts for 2016 according to our readers

One of our goals at Mendix is sharing information that will guide you on your Digital Transformation journey and help you build applications on our platform as a service that will forward your business. To this end, we have written many blog articles in 2016 to help you kick start your digital execution and enable you to confidently transform your business. Here are the top ten most-read posts of 2016.

Let’s say you have an idea for a digital product that would create a new revenue stream, or a way to better engage your customers that would differentiate your company. Because these ideas represent new and uncharted territory, turning them into value-driving applications requires frequent iteration and close collaboration between developers and the business.

That’s why Agile methodologies like Scrum are such a critical component of digital transformation. They facilitate the short feedback cycles required to rapidly develop, test and refine new ideas. As we’ve learned from helping organizations go Agile, though, there are a number of generally accepted Scrum principles that don’t work in practice with Mode 2 organizations. Read the full post to learn some common pitfalls to avoid to ensure you properly apply Scrum within your Mendix team(s).

Last year we announced support for Microsoft Azure and the availability of the Mendix platform in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Companies need digital innovation to survive, which means they need to become more productive and agile in their software delivery. Cloud platforms like Azure are part of the answer: they make application deployment and operations faster, self-service, and way more efficient. The other half of the answer is model-driven rapid application development platforms like Mendix. They enable innovative web, mobile and IoT apps to be built much more quickly and flexibly than traditional approaches.

Bringing these capabilities together in one seamless cloud stack enables enterprises to achieve lightning-quick time to market and continuous delivery of scalable, multi-channel apps. This powerful combination is key to unleashing a tidal wave of digital innovation. To learn more about Mendix and Azure, read the full article.

The need to innovate, and to do so quickly, is now deemed critically important by 88 percent of insurance companies. But innovation can come in different forms. Many companies are obsessed with coming up with the next Uber for their industry. For that reason, they’re overly focused on disruptive innovations, meaning new products or services that completely upend existing markets or create entirely new ones. Like Uber, Netflix or Airbnb.

But it is not always necessary to come up with a grandiose silver bullet idea in order to innovate. While insurers should test disruptive ideas, they can also deliver business value quickly by focusing on a different kind of innovation. Read the full article to learn more.

Mendix’s Content Marketing Director, Ed Hadley, discovered an example of a connected experience that merges the physical and digital worlds during his family trip to Disney. This 2016 trend was driven by the rapid proliferation of sensors and connected devices, aka the Internet of Things. Digitally savvy organizations are able to effectively harness the IoT and the deluge of data it creates to transform their operations, products and services and even business models. Read the full article to learn more about the new digital experience at Disney.

At the Mendix World 2016 conference last June week, Mendix CTO Johan den Haan described a new generation of Smart Apps, that transform the way end users interact with applications by being intelligent, contextually aware and proactive. Smart Apps are complex to build, therefore Mendix has created a model-driven layer on top of best-in-class IoT, big data and machine learning services. Read the article for an example of a Smart App built on Mendix and how you can build Smart Apps for your business.

This article describes the Digital Transformation talk track at last summer’s Mendix World conference, which is made up of 8 breakout sessions from Mendix developers, consultants and executives on how to make digital transformation a reality. It brings together the 4 P’s of Digital Transformation with our Digital Transformation Roadmap, providing best practices to help guide you on your digital journey. Read the blog post and click to the agenda to see the video recordings and presentation slides.

Businesses eager to harness IoT for new sources of competitive advantage may be wondering how to best discover compelling IoT use cases. One great source of inspiration is Solomon Group, an award-winning entertainment design and production firm that encountered a problem impacting its clients that couldn’t be solved using any other technology or means. Read the article to learn how they solved this major business problem with a Smart App built on Mendix.

Mendix worked with Gartner Analyst Kyle Davis on an IoT app that was showcased at the Gartner Catalyst Conference in San Diego. The brief was to make it really simple for non-technical, Citizen Developers to build a connected app and place it in the hands of the end users as a dashboard or mobile app in just a few hours.

The world of IoT is very complex, but platforms like AWS IoT, IBM Watson and Azure IoT Hub have gone a long way towards democratizing the physical connection, data gathering and streaming analytics required to manage devices and end points on the Edge. But how do you put this information into the hands of the users in the form of actionable insight? Enter Mendix 7. Read more to discover how we built a Mendix app that integrates with IoT devices managed in the AWS IoT cloud to connect to a remote control car, or simulator that would track temperature, direction and G-Force.

Speaking at the Mendix World 2016 conference, Hans Luijendijk, director of business enterprise architecture and strategy for KLM, told 2,700 IT and business leaders that rather than letting IoT projects intimidate you, the most important thing to do is to simply get started. In the case of KLM that meant developing an IoT-enabled Smart App to track where critical equipment for servicing its planes happens to be at any given moment. Read more about their Smart App in the blog post.

There’s no question that organizations need to transform themselves for the digital era—and fast. But you can’t boil the ocean when it comes to digital transformation. If you try to do everything at once and immediately focus on scale, you will fail. This blog post goes into detail on our Digital Transformation Roadmap. Drawing from our experience working with hundreds of customers, the framework is designed to help organizations do the right things at precisely the right moment, guiding them through three distinct phases of transformation: Start, Structure and Scale.